Getting the word out about your website is a huge challenge in the college media world. Part of the problem is that traditional promotional activities don't necessarily target your website's audience.
When I think of promotions, I think of contests, giveaways, and most of all, posters. Yearbooks coming in? Make a poster! Student government elections coming up? Make a poster! Cool videos on the website? Make a... poster?!?
In-house advertisements and promotional posters on campus are targeting the wrong audience-- you need to promote a website on the web! Particularly if you are promoting multimedia content, print promotions don't work.
At the Washburn Review, we've recently started producing sports highlights videos of home football and volleyball games. We decided to take a hybrid approach to marketing these videos-- we've placed some posters around campus, but the bulk of our promotional efforts has been concentrated on Facebook advertising.
We went with a pretty simple design. We're offering football and volleyball videos, hence the football and volleyball player.
This ad is playing on our homecoming game, against our big rival, Emporia State.
My only gripe with Facebook advertising is the graphic requirements-- no matter what you are advertising, your image may be no larger than 110px by 80px. Text is similarly limited--you only get so much!
The best part of Facebook advertising is the control you have over who sees the ad. I was able to configure the age range I was targetting, whether it shows for students only, location, gender, etc.
We targetted our ad at Washburn students of any age. This demographic reaches about 6,300 of approximately 7000 students at the school, which is amazing. I don't know of any other product (including our paper, unfortunately) that can claim such solid coverage of a market.
This particular ad ran for about a week in early October. We paid about $11, and had 40 visitors who stayed for an average of 3 minutes, about double our average of 1:30 for all sources that week.
At this point, I'm pretty happy with Facebook advertising. We'll keep using it, and we'll start promoting more than just sports. I hope to post within a few weeks about how our other campaigns are going.
Have you done anything like this? We are thinking about Google advertising as well--have any experience with other online marketing?
